Monday, May 4, 2009

FF seems odd because of the fact that it's based off spell hit. I notice mine missing more than any other ability I have. So using it in a rotation seems like a bad idea except to refresh it. I might be able to imagine a bear that is melee hit capped, but a bear that is spell hit capped? Now you're smoking.

You bet I'm smoking! I'm smoking the sweet smell of awesome threat, baby. Let's go to the numbers and figure out whether I'm smoking, or he's listening to anecdotal evidence.

First off, the hit numbers: melee miss rate against a level 83 mob is 8%. Spell miss rate is 17%. So faerie fire misses more than twice as much as melee attacks. Making it even worse, the crit multiplier for spells is only 1.5, spell crit is typically much lower for ferals than melee crit, and for this test we're going to assume that you're totally expertise-capped too.

We'll take a typical AP value: 6000. A crit rate of 50% for melee, and 15% for spells (this is pretty correct when raid buffed). And let's go with 0 hit total. Not really realistic, but who cares - this is bold theorycrafting when smoking time.

But wait! What about higher AP? Turns out that FFF wins at any level over swipe. Well, okay - at around 240,000AP, swipe beats FFF.

But what about a better armor reduction? After all, 30% armor is pretty high...right? Not really, but let's just take that out entirely. If your target has 0 armor, swipe will do about 120 more threat per application. But at 0 armor, your swipes are hitting for 722 damage each. I don't know about you, but that's not what mine hit for. And while you can get 0 armor as a cat under certain circumstances, chances are you'll never hit that as a bear.

What about higher crit? Even with an 80% crit rate, swipe still loses by a few hundred.

What about more hit? That's funny - because hit actually makes FFF stronger. Why? Because the hit rating to 1% hit conversion is 32.79 hit rating per 1% - but the spell hit rating only costs 26.3 hit rating per 1%. And remember - this assumed expertise capped, which means 14% reduced parry and dodge or 56 total expertise skill. Again, not really realistic; chances are against bosses you're going to have a lot less.

So for pretty much any numbers that you can think, faerie fire beats swipe, and it scales insanely well with AP. Also, if you don't have things like master shapeshifter or even naturalist, faerie fire does even better by comparison.

So yes, every time you can you should be faerie firing for maximum threat and for maximum damage. Mangle beats it, and keeping up a lacerate stack beats it - but lacerate by itself doesn't come close, nor does swipe.

26 comments:

True. Only realised that myself lately. I made some rotation calculations on iMangle or not iMangle. If yo wish check it out hereFFF is a need in any rotation. As to FF being a hit, rawr will tell you that average damage vs a hit (100% hit , 0% crit) for everything is up, except for FFF. The everage dps for FFF is lower while the average threat is only slightly higher.

PS I recently had a 3.4k FFF crit on Hodir if I remember correctly. I think I had some buff at that point. It was insane.

Wow amazing! Thanks for this analysis, I never new. I think I'll rearrage my action bars too (but I'd never create a macro, lol, bear tanking already has too few buttons to click, even if we now have one more!)

Hey Marino - I read that and the Tarskin info, and I still don't find that iMangle's compelling even with the idol of the corruptor. 4% more damage for all abilities on a reliable basis speaks to me more than the rare lost uptime on mangles leading to a slightly lower overall dodge rate on a 6-second interval. Plus it makes the rotation much, much more friendly.

Karthis, I've been training myself on that too. It's tough, and I may have to rearrange my bars - or do another macro for swipe/lacerate instead. We'll see.

Amf - that's a good idea. My only problem with that is that swipe isn't always wanted to be used.

Darksend - yeah, I suck and haven't gotten back to email as much. It does have a 1 second GCD. In practice I'm not sure how useful this is, since either you're waiting on mangles or you're actually pushing out mangles in favor of another attack (which is bad). Plus, while it has a slower GCD, it still has a 6-second cooldown.

Without IMangle, FFF and Mangle will never clip (both 6 sec cd) and better rotation will give you better damage and threat. Mine is: Pull with FFF, Mangle-Lacerate-swipe-FFF and repeat. after 5 stacks of Lacerate I use swipe twice for 1 cycle and then Lacerate again...

No other tanks in my guild come close to me from a threat point of view.

Kalon thank you again for your great research! You are the man! Or should I say the bear ))

Hey, thanks a lot for answering my question. I will always use it now when the CD is up. I figured you had the math to back it up.

I used to spec into master shapeshifter before it was popular. My current spec does without it because I wanted to see how good the new primal gore talent was. Anecdotally I seem to be able to hold aggro better. I gave up iMangle a long ago, just not enough points around to get it. Perhaps when I finally dual spec cat I will able to make a more bear focused tree (i.e. no more king of the jungle), but at the moment I still keep a few cat friendly talents.

Well I'm sorry I don't really know where to post it but as a like the way you treat every aspect of bear tanking, I'm interest to know your opinion on Blood Draining enchant. Personnaly after looking at some WWS of my guild (a warrior has got this enchant on his new weapon), the enchant didn't seem very helpful and I still think mangoose is better.

Bludge - happy to answer. The thing is - I didn't know what the answer would be. You might've been right. I hadn't seen any math that had included the penalty of hit/expertise in there, and it does miss an awful lot. A lot of people had made a similar conclusion, but I figured that it never hurts to validate it myself. :)

Anon - I don't have a good answer for you yet, because I've not been able to reliably test blood draining yet. The short answer is that in an ideal situation, it's worth about 200 stam. In a less-ideal situation it's worth 40 stam. In a typical situation it's worthless. But it's very hard to just say 'it'll always be good'. Basically, if you regularly go below 35% health, it'll be better for you. I'll try and have an article on it in the future. I think for the general case mongoose will win, just because more dodge and crit and haste is always valuable no matter what.

Monkeytree - I believe that this has finally, successfully been fixed in 3.1. Mostly because faerie fire is now a different spell in feral and non-feral forms. I guess the only way I could see is if a cat put it up beforehand or something, but even then it should be able to be overwritten unless that cat has improved FF. Which would be...bizarre.

Talking about the blood draining enchant I noticed sometimes the heal is considered as overheal on recount or WWS... (25-30%) This should never happen considered it only procs when the tank is below 35% health...It's probably a latency issue, the same as for SD

If mangle is the our most threatening ability, what is the reason for NOT speccing into imangle? I just checked your armory and we have identical specs. I never thought the 3 points were worth it, but perhaps there are times it is.

Also, I use the idol from the grizzly hills venture bay vendor. I still have my idol of terror, but I never bother to equip it because I figure the additional maul damage is worth more as threat than the agi is worth as avoidance. Am I crazy here? It never seems that 65 agi occasionally would make or break it if I lived though an encounter.

Bludge - If mangle is the our most threatening ability, what is the reason for NOT speccing into imangle? I just checked your armory and we have identical specs. I never thought the 3 points were worth it, but perhaps there are times it is.Mangle isn't a bear's most threatening move; maul is, and it's not even close. That being said, mangle is a high-threat move. Why I don't spec into it is a bit complicated. I want to have more freedom doing cat damage while being able to tank, and mangle didn't make the cut. Mangle messes up your rotation for faerie fire too (as Tarskin and Marino have pointed out), and you end up not getting as much value as you could. From earlier calculations, 3 points in imangle is roughly 3% more threat, and that simply isn't worth it most of the time to me.

Really, while we talk about threat rotations this is the bare fact: as long as you're mauling as much as humanly possible while attacking with SOMETHING, your threat is almost certainly going to be fine.

Haha yes agreed. Maul is the king of threat & damage. Though I like your macros & addon Kalon re maul switching, i never used it in the end - still seem to have infinite rage all the time, so I just left maul macroed permanently.

Now, I have to macro it into FFF too! But thanks for all your work on this; I've noticed myself gaining a much bigger threat lead on our best ranged dps in the most ranged dps friendly fights, simply by FFFing every time its up. And for 0 rage in an infinite rage environment???? I mean, thats just even more OP.

New idea for a blog post: I was just reading a forum post about tanking hard mode thorim. How about a nice mathsy article about cheezing it up as a druid, using some ridiculous combination of resilience gear, polar gear, 4pc t8, glyph of barkskin and so on. Its gonna be like sarth3d in frost resist: totally cheesy, absolutely unintended, and by far a preferred method! Quick! before anyone else blogs up the idea. Then we'll get some more nice stamina nerfs in 3.3 (and hopefully DKs will to, lol)

Anon (@Thorim Hard) - I was thinking exactly that same thing. I don't like writing articles without any concrete personal evidence, but it shouldn't be hard to show the gear, values and stats you might need to get to that point. It looks a lot like the Sarth3D FR gearing strategy, honestly.

And 56k health shouldn't be that hard to hit with a few Ulduar upgrades.

I agree. I always have FFF handy on the F-buttons. Supposedly on cataclysm theyre gonna give bear a few new buttons to hit, but FFF is great when its single target, after you have a 5stacked lacerate and mangle on cd, and nothing else to hit but maul and FFF.

ThinkTank bio

About Me

Kalon likes playing tanks, no matter how hard he tries to fight it. He is not as hardcore as many but spends a lot of time thinking about WoW, and randomly rants about it now and then. He played formerly on the Argent Dawn (EU) server and was a founding member of Fire and Blood (Quel'Dorei) before joining Casually Serious, a guild devoted to hard core progression on only 8 hours of raiding time a week.
He is a devoted husband, father, and when he has the time programs software.